Garden craft fail

The boys had step-stone kits to make mosaics in concrete, and I had a garden stone poetry kit, so I decided that a lovely, sunny, perfect weekend day should be spent stirring concrete and washing buckets instead of laying in the shade, drinking rhubarb dark and stormys, and reading a book. In the words of G.O.B., “I’ve made a huge mistake”.

The boys’ stepping stones went smoothly, and they enjoyed sticking their hands in the muck and designing their stones.

My garden poetry did not go smoothly.

Since I only had a few pounds of cement mix, I planned to make one small line – no, one half of a line, even – from the poem Hamatreya by R.W. Emerson: Earth laughs in flowers. The poem is darker than what those four words suggest, and I like the juxtaposition of the poem’s full meaning against it. I wanted to appreciate the irony of toiling next to these words as I tried to guide my flower beds into submission, futilely working to make it “mine”.

My poem was not to be. The first brick (“flowers”) went well. The concrete for the next 3 was mixed together and I added a smidgen too much water. The day got a smidgen hotter. The outside of the bricks started to harden and the insides were too wet. The resulting “bricks” are more like amoebous blobs, and the letters are unrecognizable.